Category Archives: Short Stories

The true beauty of a Princess is measured by her purity.

Snow White isn’t supposed to die in the opening scene.

The Handsome Prince is meant to be one of the good guys ~ he isn’t supposed to have an unseen silver dagger underneath his cloak.

Nowhere in the fairy tale does it say that the prince plunges the silver dagger into Snow White’s alabaster breast so that her crimson blood stains the purity of her dress and drips onto the green, green grass of the seven dwarfs’ garden.

The fairy tale does say that Snow White and the Handsome Prince will be linked together forever in broken dreams. There is no way the Prince will ever be able to forget that he murdered the Fairy Princess he was supposed to love.

He did love her.

He will spend the rest of his life trying to forget her.

He will die trying.

At least the Wicked Witch Bitch will live happily ever after.

There never was a poisoned apple, that was just a story put about by the Seven Dwarfs.

The cardinals of the Obsessive Brotherhood of Quite Holy Places were fairly certain of that. They had applied every secret ecclesiastical test and were convinced that God was an offensive, evil tempered, megalomaniacal, raging, thunderbolt slinging, quaffing rivers of booze, chronic alcoholic.

That made dealing with God more than ordinarily difficult. One wrong move and the unfortunate supplicant could find themselves transmogrified, or worse. Finding your higher power when He was suffering from a hangover or delirium tremens was bad, Very Bad Indeed. Having a proper fire-breathing dragon shoved up one’s fundament brings tears to the eyes.

There was more, and much more unacceptable. Sacrificing your first born daughter is just cruel. Although and to be fair, God had forsworn the whole forty days and forty nights of seething rain thing, after being caught out without his Mackintosh and front door key.

God’s favourite saying was; ‘You’re born, you live, and then you die, and if you haven’t been good along the way you’ll find yourself on the runaway down-bound train to the Lair of Satan.’

The damned well know that Satan could take transmogrification to a whole other low, which was exactly how God wanted it. God and Satan had discussed it over a river or three of mead.

As for God, in addition to being a dipsomaniac of biblical appetites, God was a womaniser. When He was in his cups that is, which was most of the time. God’s drinking binges could last for several hundred years. Apart from unsuccessfully chatting up Goddesses in bars, God’s favourite seduction technique was to take the shape of some heraldic beast, say a griffon, or a gigantic bull, and then convince some sorely unfortunate female that it had all been a dream. Of course, giving birth to a minotaur was apt to cause speculation among the poor woman’s neighbours and family.

Early on, the Sumarian Chapter of the Brotherhood of Quite Holy Places realised God had a nasty sense of humour. Why else would He have gone on to create the giraffe, menopausal hot flashes, Las Vagas, algebra, and quantum physics?

Of course He went too far when the created the Higgs boson, the God Particle, even though he only did that to create insanity among said quantum physicists.

That was where it all went badly wrong for God.

Using the hugely expensive Large Hadron Collider, and applying the uncertainty princple, which was one of God’s more obtuse japes, the men in white coats with bulging foreheads and lots of pens in their outside top pockets only went and discovered that the speed of light was not absolute, and subsequently went on to understand fully the Higgs boson, your actual God Particle.

That about wrapped it up as far as being an all knowing and all-seeing God of Infinite Mystery went.

Once they had understood the God Particle it was but a short step to the Nobel Prize for using the Very Large Optical Telescope in Chile, and finding out where God actually lived, and His actual telephone number. That really VLOTed God’s copybook.

From there is was only a couple of brief, but pointed, conversations with the Head Honcho of the Obsessive Brotherhood of Quite Holy Places before God had promised to mend His ways, to behave more like the sort of God the Head Honcho of the Obsessive Brotherhood of Quite Holy Places wrongly thought he wanted.

Making better sunrises and sunsets, not chasing females, attendance at twelve-step recovery programme meetings, and total abstinence from booze, hit God like the proverbial bolt from the blue.

The more die-hard among the brothers of the Obsessive Brotherhood of Quite Holy Places were a little sad to lose their old God. For example, there were fewer clearly defined areas of ecclesiastical doubt and uncertainty to exploit. It proved a bit difficult for the Obsessive Botherhood to garner huge amounts of cash, when anybody could simply phone God to ask Him what He thought on a particular question, without having to go through all that tedious religion stuff.

So here’s the thing, if you were to ask the brothers of the Obsessive Brotherhood of Quite Holy Places; ‘What is the Word of God?’ They could tell you. If they are being honest they can now quote the Word of God, with total exactitude.